Email’s popularity with LPs is matched by its wins for fund marketers, with little competition from other channels. So, why are funds ignoring much-needed authentications?
There’s still bright email-based news for fund managers: your email tools, despite heavy regulation, are critical to asset-raising marketing activities.
In Validity’s look into email deliverability, financial services (along with the B2B SaaS industry), lands in the upper half of the median inbox placement range consistently; around 92%. Why that is can be attributed to “opt-in friction.”
In highly regulated sectors (as investment managers know all too well), subscription list hygiene and permission requirements are long running compliance standards up against ill-performing retail and e-commerce companies that (again, as we all know from our individual inboxes), centre email marketing on high volumes of promotional materials.
Instead, savvy funds are more likely to engage their prospective investors through small, targeted, opt-in lists.
That’s all very well. Or is it? Unfortunately the same report underlines where even highly performant email-first funds can be exposed: DMARC configurations.
DMARC’s adoption may have climbed beyond 75% of Fortune 500 domains, yet only 35% of those are set to p=reject, the tightest setting that informs mail servers to block non-authenticated domains from reaching inboxes.
A domain that has DMARC in ‘name only’ is still at risk from impersonation at the hands of phishing and spoofing scam artists, who see fund brands as prime targets.
So, what does this mean for fund marketers?
As before, the rate of deliverability experienced by financial services companies is down to the Art of Discipline than luck: ensuring clean, opted-in, segmented lists as opposed to quick-scaling methods (such as buying or renting investor lists.)
DMARC authentication procedures are another hygiene check that makes the world of difference to avoid scam incidents that are tough to recover from, reputation-wise. And if DMARC is not set to p=reject and just being monitored, LPs may see live, spoofed emails demanding payments which no open-rate benchmark will flag to the offending funds.
A five minute conversation between marketing, compliance and IT teams is all that’s needed to close the door on inventive criminal techniques, well before the threat of a dangerous fraud incident presents itself.
